


Heartbeats

by boychik



Category: Junjou Romantica
Genre: Bears, Conversations, Crushes, Junjou Minimum - Freeform, Kids, Kissing, M/M, Memories, Mixed-Up Chronology, Nature, Writing, boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 22:18:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Junjou Minimum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heartbeats

Usually nothing can faze Usami as he scribbles away in his spiral-bound notebooks. Everything he cannot express in the pale mask of his face or gestures flows outward and takes its form in the quick penstrokes of characters and the shifting body of words. Today is different, however. The tunnel, once so gentle in its blue and green and white, is changing. The air is becoming harsher. Bracing gusts of wind rattle the dark limbs of trees and almost overturn Usami’s story in the making. The leaves bleed fire and spiral from the naked branches onto his neat pages. Even the rustle of bushes carries on the wind, its sound ghostly and amplified in his sanctuary. This kind of interruption is not welcome, and Usami looks up for a minute only to find himself staring into a pair of enormous bear-brown eyes.

***

He’d always wanted a pet, but they weren’t allowed in the dorms of the English school. The boys there were so rowdy. All he wanted was someone soft to hug and pet and tell stories. A tiny bear he could train and feed treats to, or at the very least, a dog, snub-nosed and short-tailed. That was all he wanted, and it was all he could not have. So in lieu of a bear or a dog he bought his first notebook, not for school or medical records, but just for writing. It had a smooth black cover and smooth black spirals and in the upper corner of the inside front cover he wrote in careful characters: Property of Akihiko Usami. He wrote with a Japanese pen his cousin had given him, a mechanical type with a tiny bauble of a cartoon bear hovering over the top.

He remembers the locker room at the academy in England. It was so unpleasant to hurry and change each morning, stowing his clothes and notebook carefully in the rank corner of the metal locker, but how bright his classmates were as they stripped off their coats and ties, their thin forms burning with energy, shadows of hipbone flickering across stripes of flesh.

Of the classes, he remembers less—he chose to fill those droning hours with his own stories, scrawled hastily in the margins of papers and later transcribed into one of his precious spiral notebooks.

His neighbor was a lanky, dark-haired English boy with eyes like a rabbit’s. He sat in a treehouse and said he was birdwatching but he was really watching Usami. Usami knows this because when the boy invited him to his treehouse he didn’t know the names of any types of birds. _How could you mix up the difference between a cardinal and a lark?_ Usami asked, an uncharacteristic incredulous anger blossoming for the first time since he moved. _It’s so obvious, just look at the color of its breast—_ The boy’s rabbit eyes burned into him and he leaned closer. Usami did not close his eyes. The rabbit boy kissed him on the mouth. _Shut up_ , he said. The rabbit boy was older than he was, so Usami shut up and gave in.

***

How ironic, then, that that title would be passed down to him. Misaki’s lovely, anguished screech, _USAGI-SENSEIII!_ Had he become the rabbit boy? Was he now a rabbit man? Did it even matter, after all this time? Usagi crushes out his cigarette in the ashtray. All of these thoughts are ridiculous. Of course he knows the answer: He is a bear man at heart. Nothing more, and nothing less.

***

Hiroki became a constant presence in his hideaway. They would lie side by side in the tunnel in their short shorts and long dark socks. Their shadows would touch, stretching long before the dusk. Sometimes their hands would touch too, Hiroki’s surprisingly small fingers wrapping slowly around his own. Sometimes it was their noses that touched as they wrestled, snuggled. Usami called it an Eskimo kiss. Once an Eskimo kiss slipped and it was their lips that touched. Hiroki couldn’t speak for days.

Usami used to write until seven or eight o’clock in glorious heat and light, but as winter approached, the days were getting shorter. One afternoon Usami forgot his flashlight. He didn’t want to go home that day—well, for him, this was an everyday feeling—and neither did Hiroki, who had only the promise of a bath and an empty bed and another crushing day of cram school, calligraphy, and kendo. When it got so dark that Usami could not make out the thin blue lines in his book, he drew Hiroki close. Hiroki steamed red, his voice climbing octaves as he hissed in that charming way, _Hey! Usami! What are you doing?_ But he didn’t move away, and Usami wrapped his giant white scarf around his neck. “Hiro-chan,” he whispers in Hiroki’s ear, and waits for the screaming to begin.

***

“Let’s run away together,” Usami says to Hiroki one day. It’s totally impromptu, but maybe that’s just the kind of guy he is. The kind of guy he will become.

“Whaaat? Where would we go?” Hiroki says. His scowl hasn’t lifted, but Usami knows him well enough to tell that he’s interested. That, and he broadcasts his emotions so clearly, as Usami cannot.

“Anywhere,” says Usami. He puts down his pen to watch a white cloud drift across the sky. “It doesn’t really matter. As long as we’re together, right?”

“Of course it matters!” Hiroki blushes so easily.

“Then where would you like to go?” Usami asks.

“Hmm…” Hiroki takes a minute to think before he answers. “How about outer space?”

“Space?”

“Yeah. Like the Prince of Bear Planet. He travels through space and falls in love with the Princess of Pandaworld…did you read it?”

A grin spreads across Usami’s face. “You wanna fall in love, Hiro-chan?”

“N-no!”

“Wow, you’re too red to be a panda, I think,” Usami observes. 

“Shut up!” A flush is spreading across Hiroki’s cheeks, ears, nose…he’s too easy.

“I’ve heard that one before.” Usami leans in. He’s not a rabbit, but a bear as he kisses Hiroki on the lips.

***

When the sun is low in the sky, Hiroki casts a huge, long shadow across the grove. Usami stares at the shadow, the enormous distortion of his body. It’s dark against the light but shouldn’t it be the opposite? Hiroki’s so full of light, and what is the world around them but a darkness falling through space? But his thoughts are interrupted when Usami hears Hiroki’s voice, that high, husky voice that rings strong across the breeze. Contented by the sound, Usami continues to write. In this changing world, he can be sure of at least one thing. Kamijou Hiroki may grow but he’ll never change; as Usami listens to his boyish squawks, a series of sounds separated in his mind from all meaning, he knows this is for certain.


End file.
